Sensors in Footballs – Was the Pass Good?

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Graduate student researchers are pretty much putting sensors in everything these days. There’s always more data to collect and more information to gather. Computer engineering students from Carnegie Mellon University experiment with sensors in footballs and gloves to measure grip, trajectory, speed and position.

“You’d never want to replace the human referees because they make these calls based on years of experience, and no technology can replace that,” she said. “But in addition to the instant replay, if you had a supplementary system that said this is exactly where the ball landed and where the player stopped with it, you could make these kinds of calls accurately.”

So far, she and her squad of undergraduate and graduate students have focused on two things: gloves with touch sensors that can transmit that information wirelessly to a computer, and a football equipped with a global positioning receiver and accelerometer that can track the location, speed and trajectory of the ball.

Eventually, the same kind of sensors used in the gloves could be adapted to shoes, to measure stride and running patterns, or even shoulder pads, to calculate blocking positions and force.